Specific Historical Context
Governor Bellingham In reality, Bellingham was an extensive landowner from Lincolnshire, England serving as a well-off lawyer before journeying to Boston Massachusetts in 1634. In 1635 he was elected as Deputy Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony over John Winthrop serving for a lifetime total of thirteen years. He and Winthrop were political opponents regarding suffrage and policy and his career as such was labeled with interruptions of disputes until 1642, when he lost. Richard Bellingham was an extensive landowner from Boston Lincolnshire, England serving as a well-off lawyer representing his town in Parliament before journeying to Boston Massachusetts in 1634. In 1635 he was elected as Deputy Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His service spanned three decades, during which he would be selected Deputy Governor eleven times and serve nine, one year terms as governor. He and Winthrop were political opponents regarding suffrage and policy and his career as such was labeled with interruptions of disputes until 1642, when he lost. Bellingham was one of the original twenty-six members to draw up the Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter. Upon the death of his first wife, Bellingham married a girl named Penelope previously given to another man and used the powers vested in him to perform the service himself. He was therefore bombarded with charges of impropriety and to avoid all possible charges, he took authority and refused to live the bench. John Winthrop Winthrop was born in 1588 in Groton England to a wealthy family and later studied at Cambridge University. During his tenure at Cambridge he became deathly ill and had his first religious experience which led him to convert to the Puritan faith. After his first year in Cambridge he became married to his first wife in 1606, who dies ten years later in 1616. He remarried in 1616 only to her dying a year later. His then remarried taking Margaret Tydal as his third wife, whom spends roughly thirty years together until her death in 1647. That same year, he remarried Martha Rainsboro. In 1630, he set off to the New World with three of his sons along with a fleet of colonists, upon arrival becoming the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first governor having established a reputation on the ship. Among problems with natives, his largest was Anne Hutchinson. Hutchinson was labeled a dissenter preaching against the principles of the Puritan faith and society, and thus became enemies of the church and the people. In 1637 Winthrop banished her with little opposition and criticism. Anne Hibbins Hibbins was among the colonists arriving in the 1630s. Her husband William was elected to the court in the 1640s. She was censured by the church for continual accusation of a carpenter for overcharging her for work he had done on their home. She was tried having usurped authority over her husband and excommunicated in 1641 for remaining unrepentant. Widowed in 1654, she was tried for witchcraft a year later, and still today there is no record of the charges brought against her, nor the testimony of another. The jury voted guilty and the decision was not upheld by the magistrates. Condemned a second time, she was executed that summer.